Frustrated by the game design

[swapoer]

POE II looks better and has many improved UI. After about 50 hours of playing, I became quite frustrated by the game mechanic design. The more I learn about it, the more I hate it.

 

1 Obsidian still uses the POE I attribution system. A “Mighty wizard” is one who can carry a lot and use physical weapons as deadly as a warrior. I am not talking about multi class. I am talking about pure wizard. Here is an example from multi class. My bar/wiz should enter frenzy, so he can cast spells faster. Frenzy help you cast spell more quickly. Monk’s Swift Furry, which has an icon of fists, still valid even when you are using sword or casting spell. This is a very weird and counter intuitive system. I find it very out of character.

 

2 The bonus and penalty are applied differently. It is neither an additive or multiplicative system. Obsidian expects players to be math experts who can make good judgment about which abilities or equipment offer the best return after several complex mathematic calculations.

 

3 The bonus and penalty on speed and time are more painful and ugly to understand.

 

4 After patch 4.0, the game load even longer. What is happening?

 

 

 

Overall, I would give POE II 7.5 out of 10. It has things which I enjoy at the first glance and many things I hate when I learn more about it.

 

 

 

This is the reason why I like Pathfinder: Kingmaker better, which has a well establish and easy to understand game mechanic.

[Manveru123]

Not sure if serious, that last sentence threw me off.

[Boeroer]

1) Nonsense

 

2) PoE mechanics are indeed obscure and made unnecessarily complicated.

 

3) Right. And on the other side the complicated speed system doesn't even improve anything that much.

 

4) no problems here

 

This is the reason why I like Pathfinder: Kingmaker better, which has a well establish and easy to understand game mechanic.

Edited December 21, 2018 by Boeroer

[Wormerine]

I do get a bit of the "it doesn't work as I am used to therefore it's bad" vibe.

 

Why would monk be able to use his abilities with weapons?

 

As far as "might" i somewhat agree as there is nothing in-game which connects power of magic with physical power. However, it is absolutely possible to create a useful wizard with low might - I don't mind. There was experiment during beta were might became strength and was responsible for physical damage, while magic and healing went to resolve. I though the system had some thinga going for it, but PoE system and classes simply weren't designed for that.

 

PoE has an elegance problem. I consider myself to have a vague idea on how Deadfire works, but the fine details can be too difficult to remember and figure out. At the same time an attempt to simplify things have us commonly dispised penetration.

 

Can't make a snarky comment about Pathfinder. Worrying word of mouth made me wait a bit on this one.

[rjshae]

STR in the PoE system would be a better fit for an Oriental setting, where it can represent qi, or ch'i. Western minds brought up on the nerd-power stereotype of frail wizards don't seem to wrap themselves around the idea quite as well.

[house2fly]

If you're holding weapons in your hands and wave your hands around to cast spells then something that makes your hands go faster also making your weapons and spells go faster seems intuitive enough

[Armanz]

Might as much as it throws off many people and is hated by many, makes sense logically.

[swapoer]

It seem many people like the attribution system of POE 1, which is a surprise for me.

POE borrow a lot of stuff from DND but change the attribution system of it. In my opinion, the change is bad, but to each of their own.

[DaylenAmell]

World-building wise, in regard to Might as both physical strength and spell power, don't forget that everything relies on "soul power" in Eora. You can just imagine that the spell casters are able to channel their soul power to use it as physical strength, like it's due to some well-known but unmentioned spell - maybe they should mention this spell (like Arcane Warrior spells in Dragon Age: Origins).

 

I don't find the loading time to take longer after patch 4.0 for me. Many things can cause the loading time to be longer. Are you sure it's caused by the patch?

Edited December 22, 2018 by DaylenAmell

[Triple - A Foxy Lad]

pathfinders easy enough to grasp. its built on the d20 system, which is 18 years old now and familiar to many. the systems nice and linear. 2 points in an attribute = 1 bonus to a skill = 1 bonus to a roll. most checks are d20+(relevant skill) = DC

 

it does have a hard pass/fail, so RNG is a bit more salient than in deadfires d100 miss/graze/hit/crit system. it also makes it harder for undertuned characters to deal with high DC/AC challenges.

 

one issue with pathfinder is there are far too many trap builds - and too much mixing and matching required to create optimal characters - so its easy to create characters that run into the brick wall described above.

 

focus on building correctly is not 100% a bad thing. is fun looking up busted combos on internet and developing ur own.

 

however system expects player to be doing this, so someone who wants to get their RP on and just play an un-optimised, pure class, non-spellcaster is going to suffer. u need patience for meta-gamey stuff like making all ur characters lawful for monk/paladin abuse, and giving everyone level in alchemist for mutagen (vivisectionist for sneak attack or grenadier for martial weapons) 

 

this not so much a problem with flexible DM who can scale in real time, but for a video game, it can get rough.

 

as for the whole griping about the 'might' abstraction, every system does it. like, has d&d ever settled on what 'Charisma' is supposed to be? In Numenera, you can injure urself by expending ur Intellect pool. and dont get me started on 'health points'. like does a high level character grow more flesh like tetsuo in akira? so it takes longer to hack em to bits with a scimitar? Also d&d's armour system where u wear plate to avoid damage, not absorb it. most of these things dissolve v quickly when viewed through lens of reflecting 'reality'.

 

As for the attack speed/recovery time craziness, as boeroer listed above, it is rather bonkers. and hes got reputation around these parts for knowing his ****. im lucky in a way because im in a good position to deal with it. Im a guy with pretty mediocre brainpower who has friends who are Very Good At Maths.

 

This means im acclimatised to maths being pretty counter-intuitive under the hood. my friends have (unsuccessfully) tried to explain various things to me like how hard it is to emulate true randomness, and ive half grasped a couple of things like how percentages dont cancel out.

 

like theres no way i wouldve worked out the 'double inversion' thing maxquest explained. but im at least familiar with the whole 'a car driving 25% faster gets to its destination 20% quicker, while a car driving 25% slower gets to its destination 33% later'.

 

when i noticed maluses were hitting harder than bonuses my first thought was 'oh, it's *that* thing'. as it happened, i wasnt entirely right, but eh, it was close enough that i could lumber on with it as a working assumption. for the most part, i just check how the numbers are coming out after deadfire conducts its sorcery and if it looks okay, i carry on.

 

ive also played countless other games where whats under the hood is a total mystery. pretty much every attrition based game is up to some craziness underneath, but in such games all ur doing is increasing stats, so it dont really matter. like i havent got a clue what diablos maths are, or that of any final fantasy game, or league of legends, or shin megami tensei, disgaea, etc etc. the list goes on.

 

like one thing that comes to mind is that these are all strictly video games, not pnp systems. with video games, i think were primed to expect utter madness bcs the computers calculating everything. it aint a group of people rolling dice and doing instant arithmetic.

 

deadfire is a dedicated video game. however its made in the tradition of pnp-based games - it presents its ruleset in a similar way - and people will expect that they should be able to parse it as one. if the same system was used in something other than an infinity engine/goldbox game, i doubt it would alienate half as many people.

 

atm system is trying to have cake and eat it, i feel. its trying to combine the chicanery available to computers with something that conjures the sense of playing pnp. is very in character that obsidian would attempt such a thing. i dont think theyre *wrong* to do so, and it doesnt upset me, but - as always - theyre taking the longer road and making work for themselves.

 

i kinda love 'em for it, but hey-ho.

[draego]

D&D mechanics is what is keeping me from playing pathfinder, heh especially the ton of skill options which can gimp your build. Compared to d&d i find Pillars attributes, abilities, and skill alot more intuitive to figure out and i dont have to consult build tomes of ancient knowledge to play the game. I get there are some obscure stuff in Pillars but compare to D&D its not even close.

Edited December 22, 2018 by draego

[Ensign]

The double inversion craziness is at least a mathematically elegant system that behaves in good ways.

 

Its main problem is how hard it is to communicate what is going on. With damage modifiers I don't think it is too bad, but when you start mixing speed and recovery modifiers it gets hard to keep straight. Mix in differences action vs recovery speeds and...yeah the messaging is a mess.

[Verde]

I think PoE2 took steps back in the attributes. Resolve is almost completely unnecessary and Might has major diminishing returns. And I do agree that Might dictating damage even on Wizards is a major turn off but that's nothing new. I think Intelligence is too powerful and having say, a Barbarian with high Int just kills immersion so I never do it Not game breaking for me, but indicative of PoE2's one step forward one step back approach.

Edited December 23, 2018 by Verde

[Ensign]

It's interesting how small changes in the zero point have such profound impacts on player perception.  Might (and Con) are the only attributes unchanged from PoE1, and its viewed as much weaker this time around despite most of its competition being nerfed.  Might played an outsided impact on damage in the early game of PoE1 due to its interaction with armor, and even though that diminished harder than it does in PoE2 the perception of it being the best stat in that game remains.

 

Resolve is in a tricky spot.  1 deflection per point is a bit weak for an attribute on most characters, but 2 deflection per point would be one of the strongest attributes in the game and make uber-tanks trivial to build.  The affliction duration is a good knob to turn, if a bit naturally insensitive - the strongest afflictions are dangerous enough that you want to resist them, and the tier below those tends to be spammed enough that resolve doesn't move the needle much.  They could afford to turn that knob up a bit, to ~5% per point - though that might annoy players more from high resolve foes than they'd appreciate its benefits, and debuffing resolve to maximize affliction durations would be a more salient - and less visible - part of the stat.

 

Unfortunately, unlike the health from constitution, deflection doesn't have naturally sharp diminishing returns, so I suspect people will be 'lol dump resolve' for any values of the defensive stats until it's wildly overpowered, at which point the calculus flips and everyone maxes it without thinking.  Its current spot is fine, even if players tend to want to max or dump it, instead of naturally tending towards a moderate value like most other stats.

Edited December 23, 2018 by Ensign

[Gromnir]

finds poe to be counter-intuitive.

 

finds poe counter-intuitive 'cause it doesn't follow d&d/d20 model.

 

wants poe to be more like d&d/d20.

 

...

 

does not compute.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[uuuhhii]

additive and multiply number thing are true

it was very confusing

poe attribute are atleast better then pathfinder or divinity

the wisdom and charisma thing make no sense

memory are weird too

Edited December 24, 2018 by uuuhhii

[Cartoons Plural]

did pathfinder devs hire a bunch of eastern europeans to ****post about other games tho seriously

[protopersona]

did pathfinder devs hire a bunch of eastern europeans to ****post about other games tho seriously

The Pathfinder franchise has a much larger and more established fanbase really. Familiarity can make something seem better in comparison to something new. So basically the system they are already comfortable with makes more sense. The new system by comparison is illogical. Even though both are complete abstractions that don't stay completely logical or consistent.

[greenpine82]

I really the real-time combat system of this game. But I think the attribute system & the defense system need to be improved more. For example,  I cannot understand the logic behind these mechanics: Accuracy vs Fortitude, Accuracy vs Reflex, Accuracy vs Will. I think there is a better mechanic for these DnD/Pathfinder concepts

Edited December 25, 2018 by greenpine82

[Takkik]

The problem with might is the lack of consistency in the system & the writting. Like someone written earlier, might could represent you soul power, but the problem it's the only abstract stat. Writters substitue a lot strength to might in interactions, that can lead to muscle wizard problem. They could rework attributs to represent your soul (inner power) and only rely on athletic when they want physical strength (and other skills).

 

The problem with Poe 1&2 system is that normaly a P&p RPG system is designed to be run by humans. Players must understand it or it's unplayable. And more recent RPG tend to be storytelling first with lighter rules when at the begining RPG where simulationist heavy.

 

I suspect Poe 2 system was written by programmers first. They wrote the formulas/engine without thinking about the designer & players that will use it. Designers that came after, making the weapons, abilities etc... got hard time to figuring out the system and we got problem like gun critics that do less dmg. And for the players it's even worst.

It's why the balance was so bad at launch, why when they add new magical items we got weird interactions sometimes because designers have hard time figuring out the system.

Edited December 24, 2018 by Takkik

[Cartoons Plural]

 

did pathfinder devs hire a bunch of eastern europeans to ****post about other games tho seriously

The Pathfinder franchise has a much larger and more established fanbase really. Familiarity can make something seem better in comparison to something new. So basically the system they are already comfortable with makes more sense. The new system by comparison is illogical. Even though both are complete abstractions that don't stay completely logical or consistent.

its weird to me how often negative user reviews for their competition end in "unlike pathfinder kingmaker which is amazing"

 

pathfinder table top always seemed like the system for suckers who didnt get juiced on books enough from 3.5

[greenpine82]

Blaming the others is not good. It’s pretty easy just to ignore the weak point of the game and blame someone else even though you know it's true.

[Verde]

Blaming the others is not good. It’s pretty easy just to ignore the weak point of the game and blame someone else even though you know it's true.

And to take a step further, taking criticism of a game personally. But I'm sure we're all guilty of that when it's a game/feature we love.

Edited December 25, 2018 by Verde

[Guest Psychovampiric Shield]

I really the real-time combat system of this game. But I think the attribute system & the defense system need to be improved more. For example,  I cannot understand the logic behind these mechanics: Accuracy vs Fortitude, Accuracy vs Reflex, Accuracy vs Will. I think there is a better mechanic for these DnD/Pathfinder concepts

 

Interesting. I think the logic is like this: combat is essentially search for optimal or at least good enough order of who will attack whom with what. For that to be fun, there have to be a) many solutions, b) multiple viable solutions and c) preferably no obvious solutions.

If all combatans were the same, with one generic attack, solution would be to just focus on any enemy, then on the next etc., which would be boring as hell. If all enemies were almost the same, but some did more damage, the solution wold be to focus on high damage enemies first, which would be slightly more intriguing, but still overall boring. If some were easier to hit, then the solution would be to focus on easier to hit, high damage first, then it would be unclear whether harder to hit, high damage, or easier to hit, low damage should go first, but in any event, harder to hit, low damage would go last. And that would be markedly more intriguing combat system than the one we started with.  If some enemies were harder to hit with some attacks, but easier to hit with some other attacks, it would perhaps be prudent to stop focusing all on one and have some companions attack some enemies with certain attacks, and some attack other enemies with other attacks. Even more so if some enemies took less damage from certain attacks, but more from some other attacks.

So you see, with each added layer, combat becomes more complex and intriguing. But not just combat. When you level up, instead of simply learning a spell that does highest damage, you may consider spell that does less damage, but targets different defense, has different damage type, penetration etc.

 

EDIT: speaking of penetration/DR, I salute whoever came up with it.

Edited December 25, 2018 by Psychovampiric Shield

[protopersona]

EDIT: speaking of penetration/DR, I salute whoever came up with it.

I think that might be the most positive thing I've read about Penetration in Deadfire.